Pol Pot’s Children

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ABSTRACT: LETTER FROM CAMBODIA about the country’s nominally democratic elections in the aftermath of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. More than a million and a half Cambodians were murdered during the regime’s campaign to create a “new people.” Its leader, Pol Pot, died on April 15th, and on July 26th Cambodians were allowed to vote, for the second time in five years, in a multiparty national election. But before all the votes had even been tallied, Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge member who has been Prime Minister since 1985, declared victory and threatened to rewrite the constitution to validate his claim. Last July, Pol Pot had been toppled in a Khmer Rouge power struggle. The first time Pol Pot was driven from power, in 1979, by the Vietnamese, the United States tacitly supported the rearmament of the Khmer Rouge. The last Cambodian election, in 1993, had been the first time in recorded history that Cambodians had a reasonably free vote, with secret ballots —made possible by a United Nations occupation force. Although ninety per cent of the electorate went to the polls, and by a substantial plurality voted for the only significant opposition party, Hun Sen threatened to secede and go to war if the vote was not “corrected.” The crisis was resolved by concocting a government in which Hun Sen and the opposition leader, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, son of the Cambodian King, stood as co-premiers, but the new regime was paralyzed by intrigue and corruption. Hun Sen’s international stock began to rise when he called for a new election, but the United States refused to help pay for the elections in advance. Hun Sen’s forces last week began a program of violent retaliations against opposition supporters. There were thirty-nine parties listed on the ballot in July, but there were only two serious opposition contenders: Prince Norodom Ranariddh, and Sam Rainsy, a former Finance Minister and a parliamentarian of Ranariddh’s party. After Pol Pot’s death, President Clinton called for a continued effort to capture and bring to justice the surviving members of the Khmer Rouge leadership who were responsible for the atrocities of the purge years. Hun Sen has said that he will cooperate with such an effort, but many say he has no interest in allowing a tribunal to open the past to legal inquiry. “Let him be dead,” the Cambodian King, Norodom Sihanouk, said when Pol Pot died—as if that were possible.